Alpine’s iXA-W404 with its 4.3-inch QVGA touchscreen and iPhone compatibility is fully capable of navigating all your iPhone’s music, movies, tv shows, and more by the touch of your finger.
https://gizmodo.com/the-ixa-w404-is-alpines-first-touchscreen-iphone-compat-5125794
The Alpine headunit I tested was plugged into a iPod nano instead of an iPhone but an Alpine representative assured me it has the same functionality when connected to an iPhone.
Alpine’s has had iPod compatibility for a few years and the iXA-W404’s menu navigation for the iPod and iPhone is nothing new. There has always been touchscreen navigation based off your iPods media folders and this works the same with the iXA-W404’s 4.3-inch touchscreen.
The only notable feature is Alpine’s attempt at mimicking Apple’s Coverflow. The album cover browser is like a very basic Coverflow and only allow you to select full albums rather than specific tracks within an album like the real Coverflow.
Yea, this imitation Coverflow is a cool idea but using it on a small 4.3-inch screen is stupid because there is not enough screen real-estate to browse through a ton of albums, especially when trying to drive a car. This issue made me question why Alpine chose a 4.3-inch touchscreen form factor over their popular 7-inch touchscreen media loving IVA-W505 unit which would have made finger navigation of music by album cover a valuable feature.
https://gizmodo.com/alpine-iva-w505-video-headunit-plays-divx-ipod-video-339296
